Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to storage systems and, more specifically, to load balancing of input/output (I/O) workloads in a storage system.
Background Information
A storage system typically includes one or more storage devices, such as disks embodied as hard disk drives (HDDs), into which data may be entered, and from which data may be obtained, as desired. The storage system may implement a high-level module, such as a file system, to logically organize the data stored on the disks as storage containers, such as files or logical units (LUNs). The storage system typically includes a front-end module to receive requests from a host that form a workload. The system may also include a load balancer at the front-end to distribute the workload among the storage containers. However, previous load balancers are generally directed to varying workloads without regard as to the type of storage media, e.g., solid state drives (SSDs) such as flash storage devices, whose characteristics may differ significantly from HDDs. Typically, optimal I/O sizes and I/O patterns of various workloads differ substantially between, e.g., HDDs and SSDs. Further, such previous load balancers are also employed for data migration (already stored data) between storage containers. In sum, the previous load balancers are focused on host requests received at the front-end of the storage system, rather than optimizing I/O workloads to back-end storage devices.